exhibitions
       & curatorial projects

INUNDATION: Art and Climate Change in the Pacific

INUNDATION refers to both the watery disasters of climate change and the overwhelming emotions they evoke. The layered meaning of the term offers a way to reflect on the work of the nine contemporary artists in this exhibition. Based in the Pacific, they all experience the climate emergency not just as a dramatic new reality, but also as the accumulation of long-term colonial, extractive and development forces that have made their communities especially vulnerable.

With communities forcibly displaced by sea-level rise and storms, islands bombed, coral reefs mined, and local and indigenous environmental knowledge lost, resiliency seems difficult to imagine. And yet, communities around the Pacific are responding first and foremost by offering compelling images of our relationship to water and to the climate.

The aesthetics of water is a dominant feature in the art of INUNDATION.  The experience of being surrounded by water, the experience of wading in lo’i kalo of being moved by ocean currents, shifted in its tides—and thriving—can open new conversations about what inundation means.
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DOUBLE TAKE: Films and Texts of Johan Grimonprez
Oct 21- Dec 6 2019
co-curated with Jose Ferreira
UHM Art Gallery
 
Johan Grimonprez’s practice bridges art, cinema, and fiction by performing an archeology of contemporary media. In his non-linear film essays and video installations, he often puts early television and cinema in dialog with contemporary fictional texts and historical events in order to explore how the past informs the present (and vice versa).
 
Grimonprez is best known for his films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), a
critically-acclaimed examination of representations of airplane hijackings, and Double Take (2009), a poetic interpretation of Cold War politics told through Alfred Hitchcock’s eyes.
 
Over the decades, his body of work has established a mode of questioning the development of the fear industry . Using a combination of found footage, scripted fictional scenarios, and poetic texts, Grimonprez invokes the double take, that uncanny feeling that one has missed something the first time around and needs to look again.

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
— Lewis Carroll
PHEOBE CUMMINGS
Cella
co-curated with Rod Bengston
February 24-March 24  2013
UHM art gallery

Working predominantly from unfired clay, Cummings constructs pieces directly on site as temporary installations or interventions within a place. Both material and process are of particular significance to Cummings, her intensive labour of making is heightened by the ephemerality of the work's existence. Often the pieces come to exist only as a photograph or memory.

 Over the course of the three weeks, Phoebe had about 10 people working nonstop to press clay through a strainer to create thousands of tiny cilia-like shapes that were then pressed into a chicken wire structure hanging from the ceiling of the gallery.  The power of accumulation resulted in a large organic form emanating from the center of the gallery.
BEILI LIU
Yuan 原
April 2014
 
Originally from Jilin, China, Beili Liu received her MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before joining the faculty at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is currently an associate professor. Liu is known for her refined, simple, and visually striking post-minimalist interpretations of materials such as sumi ink, salt, silk thread, vellum, rice paper, and Chinese spirit money. Based on organic repetition and subtle dynamics of energy transformation and tension, her abstractions engage in issues of cultural belonging and interpersonal negotiation.
 
Her newest installation, Yuan, is a vast circular field composed of hundreds of crosscut bamboo. The center of the field is accessible via rivulets that act as immersive pathways. The rim of each bamboo is charred black with fire; its empty center filled with white granular sea salt. These three elements—bamboo, salt and charring—represent earth, sea and fire. The use of renewable materials in Yuan are a site-specific response to the UH Art Gallery context and to the Hawaiian Islands as a whole, but are also open to Liu’s ongoing engagement with her own cultural background.
 
Yuan 原, in Chinese, refers to “origin,” and “cause,” as well as “field.” Yuan 圆, another character with the same pronunciation, stands for “round” and “circular.” In conjunction with these multiple references, Liu uses her materials to question simple notions of beginning and presence. Bamboo, among its many symbolic resonances, stands for the most desired and respected Confucian virtues: honor, modesty and purity. The void inside of this extraordinary plant is the exact quality that enables its yielding strength and its ability to transport, support and contain. Likewise, salt references the fluidity between liquid and crystal states. Burning as process is also used in a number of Liu’s pieces as the embodiment of the natural cycles of death and rebirth.
MAIKA'I TUBBS
Extended Play
ii gallery
July 26 - Aug 24 2013
 
What is the “life” of memory? Does its elasticity and/or degradation correlate to the technology that we use to archive and share our most precious pictures, words, and events?   Extended Play contemplates these questions in reference to the setting on now-defunct video recorders, which captured less information so as to extend the capacity to record longer.
 
In this installation, the medium of VHS magnetic tape acts as a catalyst for contemplating the tensile strength of memory as it is stretched by our access to information and human connection with ever more sophisticated magnetic, radio, and digital technology: smart phones, Google, wikis, and Facebook.  Anthropologists and cognitive scientists have long debated the correlation between our capacity for long-term memory and our kinship networks. (“Dunbar’s Number” famously estimates that we can maintain social groups of 150 people).  Extended Play is an invitation to reconnect with the active principles of memory association, while also extending the life of an otherwise obsolete material.
alterna APEC 
Nov. 4 - 19, 2011   
ARTS at Mark's Garage
co-curated with Noelle Kahanu and Rich Richardson

Local and international artists from around the Pacific region developed creative research projects about Hawaii's local economy.

Keiko Bonk / Eating in Public / Jeffry Feeger / Bob Freitas / Vince Hazen / Scott Groeniger /  Vincent Goudreau & Javier Martinez / Imaikalani Kalahele / Mat Kubo / Sally Lundburg / Shane Pale / Carl Pao / Pek-Pek Liberation Front, 3rd Path O`ahu, & Women's Voices, Women's Speak/ Maya Portner / Margo Ray / Seeds and Deeds/ Kirsten Simonsen / St. Marko / Keith Tallett / Dan Taulapapa / Toimairangi art school / Scott Yeoll.  
Pan Pacific Nation
March 3rd to March 28th, 2009
The ARTS at Marks Garage.
co-curated with Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu

an exhibition of contemporary Pacific Islands art.